It’s a process I really haven’t had too much experience observing in myself, this following or wandering. Mostly I’m just seized by something or stung by something or lit up by something, and off I go. Sometimes it seems like I’m a moth bumping up against that hurricane-chimney surrounding the flame, sometimes it’s as if a butterfly, so beautiful, so utterly unique, so unknown, must be followed. And sometimes it’s like trying to find a place I don’t even know, “somewhere down that crazy river.”

~

This morning, I love how I am led.

Yesterday, a seeming disappointment: a chance to ‘upgrade,’ to move to another place, bigger, better, greener, was closed off. A door knocked, remaining locked. And yet this morning, traveling outside to my little perch out front, portfolio with my gratitude journal, my ‘journal-journal,’ my not-favourite pen, my keys, my phone, my cup of joe, my smokes, my lighter, my towel to wipe down the bench after the rains … this morning I come outside and wonder just for a second why the bench is wet but not the streets … and I smell the diesel first, then hear the truck, and realize the workers that come to this part of the world like little elves, water for the hanging baskets …

how can I not break down with all of this, this great fortune, this plentitude?

and I look and I smell and I wipe and I sit and I write

and for a moment I think this may be the only reason for which I sold my home and for which I moved here and not somewhere else, just so I could travel outside this morning and hear the drops of water hitting the concrete, hear the sounds of this city which is me / us / now, the flaps of wings, the music of coos from gables…

~

I came to write about acceptance this morning.

Me, flush with so much, me not even grateful enough by half, I put on clean clothes, wonder about in this space, make coffee, wonder what to eat, this cornucopia. I choose a banana again, bringing it home yesterday. And this is like the word asphalt*, this eating a banana. I cannot peel a banana without thinking of the missionary couple who taught me years ago that most of us in the Western world peel bananas from the wrong end. And so peeling it, struggle, dig thumbnails in, cut with knives and yet turning it – imagine – just turning it, like it’s been waiting its whole life for us to discover it, it’s – so – easy

And I peel the banana and eat it and come here and coming here remember the other lesson, which may very well be the only reason these two missionaries came into my life: to teach me how to peel a banana properly and to teach me the real lesson about acceptance.

“Acceptance is the answer to all my problems.” Hundreds of us repeat this to ourselves, sometimes without mercy. We quote the text, we memorize the page numbers, we drone it on and on. And I used to like the fact that I wasn’t in love with the quote, used to like that I liked the paragraph ahead of it better, where it tells me that “when I stopped living in the problem and started living in the solution, the problem went away.”

Yet what does that mean?

Lately, for me, I think it’s meant I’ve been “fishing with dynamite.”

Blessed again, this morning I remember the missionaries, who taught me about acceptance nearly 30 years ago, yet somehow the lesson only comes home today. Because, it seems, lessons aren’t half as handy until I remember the context.

They said to me one day, standing in the kitchen, after the lesson about the banana-peeling: Expect nothing and accept everything.

Somehow, since then, I’ve added the burdens of “I don’t have to like everything I accept” and “fishing with dynamite.”

The context, however, was remembered this morning – how they first told me about their beat up jalopy, and how they needed not one but four new tires and how they started to gripe about life and how unfair it was and all the great works they were doing and couldn’t (their) God just cut them a break once in a while, until they remembered themselves and who they were talking about and to, and they learned the first part of the lesson – to expect nothing, that expectations are what hobbles us, how expectations are so absolutely useless and unnecessary. And so, like the proverbs, they looked at their car and were thankful for all its conveyances, thankful for its IS-ness, and left it alone.

And sure enough, it happened that a benefactor showed up, who wanted to do what he could to support the missionaries and went out and bought and had installed four, brand-new tires. And this is where the second part of the lesson came in – they accepted the gift. Humbly, gratefully, fully.

They walked in faith, freely, after chucking the expectations, ready to receive.

May I look at everything, every person, every place, every one, as that gift – chosen, wrapped, presented – expressly for me. May I receive with a glad heart. May I take a moment to look and to hold and to bless it. And may I always peel it, properly.

Namaste,

Your Les

* With gratitude to the teacher who gently but firmly taught me the correct way to pronounce asphalt and other key words. Je me souviens.